different to me: Armand’s unfiltered grief, so bare and so deep.
So naturally my instinct was to deflect it.
“How is your father?”
Armand squeezed his eyes closed. “You saw him. Looks splendid, doesn’t he? The butler can’t uncork the bottles of claret fast enough.”
I glanced over at the wineglasses on the desk but said only, “Maybe what he needs is you nearby. You know, just being around him more. That might help.”
“He can’t even look me in the face. Didn’t you catch that? It’s like if he looks at me, he sees only his dead son, not his live one. It fills him with hate.”
“I’m sure it’s not—”
“He’s getting in guns,” Armand said. “Crates and crates of guns. He’s always been a collector. He and some of his blokes, they even formed a hunting club. But this is something different. This is … more. Today it was machine guns.”
I tipped my head. “What’s that?”
“They’re quite modern.” He scratched at his shoulder through his shirt and straightened some. “They use bullets on a belt that’s fed into a drum. It’s thoroughly—” He noticed my face. “They fire a lot of bullets very, very quickly. Quicker than anything else.”
I looked up and around the bedroom, the mismatched furniture, the weirdly firm light. “Why? What could you hunt with those? What could they have to do with anything?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “That’s what’s so unnerving.”
I rubbed a hand to my forehead, feeling an ache beginning to build behind my skull. “Armand.”
His eyes went to mine.
I had to say this carefully; I had no wish to add to his despair, but I couldn’t let it go. “Do you think … do you suppose it’s possible that your father might … mean to do you any harm?”
But I’d actually made him smile. A real one, too, even if it came acerbic and thin. “With a pair of Vickers? Not unless he means to mount them in the hallway and spray me with bullets when I’m not paying attention. Seems like rather a spot of work for him. Surely even an unwelcome heir is better than none.”
I returned his smile as I pulled away my hand. “I think we need to teach you how to Turn to smoke, just in case. It’s a handy thing to be able to vanish in a hurry.”
His smile widened, but there was no humor left to it. “Handy.” He fell back against the blankets of the bed, his eyes gone shiny and hard. “If I could vanish into smoke, Eleanore, I’d leave this place and never return. That’s a promise.”
“Just like Rue,” I said softly.
“Yes. Why not? Just like Rue.”
• • •
“I’m spending until dawn with you,” I said firmly. “Don’t bother to argue.”
“God forbid,” said Jesse, solemn.
I pushed past him into the cottage. He’d been waiting up for me, I could tell. There was a book spread facedown upon the table, a pair of lamps lit beside it.
“I thought you said you were resting tonight.”
“Aye. I was. But then it occurred to me that the bed wasn’t nearly so comfortable without you. So I got up and hoped.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and dug my toes into the soft nap of the rug. The cottage had been built within a protective circle of birches; even during the heat of day, it was never very warm.
“You hoped for me?” I asked, uncertain.
Jesse came close, put his arms around me, and buried his face in my hair. “As always. As ever.”
“And I came,” I whispered, closing my eyes, breathing him. The ache behind my forehead began to unbind.
“And you came,” he agreed.
And he summoned the magic that was all his own, beyond stars and starfire. A magic of mortal lips and hands, of bristly new whiskers scraping my chin, of melting kisses that made the whiskers unimportant.
Our bodies entwined, our hearts. Our lives.
I think that was the night a very quiet, very powerful part of me began to comprehend how it was going to be. I think the part of me that was magic, that had broken away from the practical earth to slip along Jesse’s celestial family of stars, to allow them to bind me in their spell …
That part of me knew.
• • •
A lethargy had taken the castle and all the girls in it. Very few of the students had known Aubrey, but we all knew of his family and his station, and that was enough to wash the color from the cheeks of entire classes. We